Nvidia is pretty vague regarding the root cause, but I read between the lines that it would be a encapsulation (IEC61937) issue with high-bitrate . The fact that they couldn't resolve it, with all their power, means that it is a tricky one, unfortunately, and that it will take a lot of digging into (non-public) documentation to chase it...

The actual layout of the Dolby MAT frame used to encapsulate TrueHD for HDMI transmission is unknown and undocumented, so unless someone finds the specification how to do this, I’m afraid there isn’t even a starting point to start looking

So my guess is that the ffmpeg implementation (probably reverse-engineered) is the only one publicly available, hence all software players suffering the same

Just an update on this, i am not so sure this is a max bitrate issue, i posted on the shield forum the lion king which has a high max bitrate plays fine. I am however seeing this issue on seamless branched disney movies only. On any non seamlessly branched movies i do not. That thread koying linked to, i will try dead men tell no tales which was reported to have dropouts, it is however one single mt2s file. Its possible this is fixed already on the shield as far as max bitrate issue goes?

whoever maintains lav filters also recently fixed that issue (seamless branching issue), apparently the windows 10 media player did not experience dropouts for seamless branched movies ripped to mkv, and that was used to fix the bugs with the lav filters truehd decoder from my understanding. The seamless branched disney movies are currently the ones i am seeing dropouts on and where the link koying provided the discussion headed as problematic movies. The file i uploaded to koyings cloud service is a seamless branched movie ripped to mkv. I would love to blame ripping software since oppo players have the same dropouts, but seeing how the movie and apps player built into windows 10 did not (and which apparently lead to the lav fix) now im not so sure.

OK nevermind, max bitrate issue is definitely real, dead men tell no tales has dropouts on high bitrates.

Really disappointing, I think i might have to go back to my zappiti, no fault of mrmc team, unfortunately this is a shield issue imo unless koying can fix something like this himself on the shield. Unfortunately the shield team still have not sorted this out. Maybe one day. Zappiti has some issues as well but it has workarounds for those.

I am not sure how i could get into the beta testing program but it looks like some possible changes to some of the issues i posted. I do currently have a shield and apple tv, although I have 2 more weeks to decide if the shield is going back to amazon.

I am not sure how i could get into the beta testing program but it looks like some possible changes to some of the issues i posted. I do currently have a shield and apple tv, although I have 2 more weeks to decide if the shield is going back to amazon.

Take a look at the first post in this thread. Once you’ve joined, when a new beta is available it will automatically download on your nvidia shield. I like both the Apple TV4k and the shield but the shield has a lot more to offer us.